Dub producer Mad Professor remains an analogue soul in a digital world

The artist also known as Neil Fraser will revisit his work with Massive Attack in a VIFF Live show at the Chan Centre

By JOHN LUCAS

Mad Professor

VIFF Live presents Mad Professor at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on October 5 at 7:30 pm

NO PROTECTION, MAD Professor’s landmark 1995 album of Massive Attack remixes, is quite possibly the best-selling dub record of all time, although that’s hard to determine, since no one actually maintains a chart for the genre.

What’s indisputable, however, is that the LP sparked a resurgence of interest in dub production in the mid ’90s, and was a staple of dorm rooms, chill-out lounges, and so-hip-it-hurts coffee shops for years.

There are even those who claim that they have listened to No Protection more times over the subsequent decades than they have to the source material—Massive Attack’s 1994 trip-hop release, Protection—but Mad Professor himself is skeptical on that point.

“People tell me that all the time, but I don’t really believe it,” says the producer, known to the taxman as Neil Fraser, when Stir reaches him via Zoom in Costa Rica. “Because the original is the original, and I just played around with different tracks. I’ve got a lot of respect for the band, and I thought, yeah, let me give it another twist, you know?” 

Fraser reveals that he had met the future members of Massive Attack several years earlier, when they were part of a loose collective of musicians and DJs known as the Wild Bunch.

“We met in Bristol, then I didn’t see nothing or hear nothing from them until a fax came through—these were the days of faxes—from Virgin, and they said, ‘This is a track from a band we’ve just signed, and we’d like you to do a remix, a dub mix,’” Fraser recalls. “I listened to it, and I thought, yeah, why not see what angle I could take? I changed the bass line, added a few keyboards, and then mixed it up—dubbed it up.”

That first track was “Sly”, which features Scottish singer-songwriter Nicolette on lead vocals. Mad Professor’s version, retitled “Eternal Feedback”, replaces the downtempo-soul vibe of the original with clattering beats and reverberating shards of melody—what the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau memorably described as “whooshings and clangings and suckings and scrapings and boomings and snatches of tune”.

“Tape is magic. To me, tape sounds better than a computer.”

Mad Professor

Any kid with a laptop, Ableton Live, and a suite of delay plugins could approximate the sound of dub, but it would be almost impossible to fully capture the teetering-on-the-brink-of-chaos organic danger of the real thing. An offshoot of reggae, dub was pioneered in the 1960s and early ’70s by recording engineers like King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry, who essentially used the studio mixing console as an instrument, artfully deconstructing songs and making ample use of tape-based delay effects units including the Roland Space Echo.

Mad Professor stands by the old ways; Fraser says he’s an analogue soul in a digital world.

“I use tape a lot in my studio,” he says. “I love using tape. Tape is magic. To me, tape sounds better than a computer, so I’m always running tracks on tape. It takes a little bit longer, but it’s more humane. There’s so much human element using tape, you know? The music speeds up and slows down. It’s great, it’s wonderful.”

As for Mad Professor’s “Sly” reworking, it’s safe to say that Massive Attack was satisfied with the result. “They heard what I’d done and they were over the moon,” says Fraser, who was then assigned to work his dub magic on other Protection tracks. As it turns out, he was making an entire new album, although he wasn’t aware of it until much later.

“In fact, people kept telling me about the record before I even realized there was a record out,” Fraser says. “Then, later on, I saw the figures. I saw that the record sold a million copies on vinyl. That was crazy. A million copies! I couldn’t believe it.”

The timing could not have been better; as the trip-hop genre grew in popularity, Massive Attack—alongside other Bristol-based acts including Portishead, Tricky, and Smith & Mighty—quickly came to be hailed as vanguards of a new sound.

“I didn’t know what kind of reach the band had, national or international,” Fraser admits. “It was within two or three months after the record was issued, that’s when I started to get calls from the Philippines, New Zealand, Australia, Brazil.”

Three decades on, No Protection still sounds as fresh and revolutionary as it did the year it came out. That makes it an anniversary well worth celebrating, which Mad Professor will do with a show at the Chan Shun Concert Hall. Fraser notes that his set will consist of Massive Attack tracks interspersed with a selection of other material from his career, which started in the early ’80s. 

Part of the VIFF Live series, it will also feature live visuals from Vancouver interdisciplinary and new-media artist Saghi Ehteshamzadeh.

“I’m an experimenter, so I’m always open to experiments,” says Fraser. “So I look forward to that.”

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